


The Happy Ones Are Near

by prufrock



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: (that's a tag?), Alternate Universe - 1960s, Alternate Universe - Cults, Alternate Universe - Dark, Childbirth, Drug Abuse, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, Drug Withdrawal, Emotional Manipulation, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Gen, Goat Farm, Graphic Description, Hallucinations, Hippies, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Multi, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Smoking, Vietnam War, Vomiting, graphic depiction of birth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-13
Updated: 2016-02-13
Packaged: 2018-05-20 00:10:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 20,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5985760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prufrock/pseuds/prufrock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The year is 1968. Howard Stark's genius son is a missing person sitting in Detective Nick Fury's case file, Steve Rogers has just been invalided back from Vietnam, and "Father" Obadiah Stane is collecting members for his family.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Exodus is Here

**Author's Note:**

> This fic came out of conversations with glasscaskets along the theme "but what if the Avengers were all in a creepy cult in the 60s?" Disclaimers include: I was born in the 90s, and I have never visited California.

1.

Detective Fury’s fresh shirt is practically in sight—he’s got his hand on the damn doorknob—when they tell him. It’s been two days, forty-eight hours of adrenaline and frustration, wide eyes and dead silence; he thinks he got shit on his shoes at that old farmhouse and he’s pretty sure he smells of weed himself at this point, and nobody’s fucking talking until Detective Hill knocks on the same fucking door he was about to leave by for a goddamn nap.

“She’s asking for you, sir.”

“Now?” Detective Hill nods and doesn’t elaborate; she’s been here as long as he has.

Fury puts down his briefcase, drinks the cold coffee he left for the janitor, and tightens his tie.

“I’m coming.”

\- - - - -

She’s sitting at the table when he comes in, still in her hospital gown, hugging her own skinny, freckled arms. They don’t have clothes yet. Fury assumes somebody’s working on that. Either nobody gave her a comb, or she didn’t feel like using it, because her hair’s pulled back in one scary clump at the back of her neck. Out of everyone Fury’s talked to the past two days, she looks the best, and she looks like a moderate wind would crack her in two.

“Miss Potts?” She jumps a little at the sound of her name, then nods, biting her lip; she still hasn’t looked up at him, but he’s noticed they’re all shy about eye contact.

“Hi,” she says, and finally picks up her eyes. They’re steadier than Fury expected, and he starts to feel a little better about missing his nap for this. She stares for a few seconds and drops her gaze to the table again, rubbing her left arm like it hurts.

“So,” he says, and spreads out a clean sheet of legal in front of him. “Where do you want to start?”

She nods a few times, like she’s getting herself ready to talk, and looks up at him again. “I’ll get immunity?” she asks, and ok, she’s seen some TV shows, smart kid.

“Sure, if you help us out. Sure.”

She’s not satisfied with that. “And the rest of them?”

“Depends on them. Whether they help us out.”

She thinks about that for a minute, and makes her choice. “Me and Tony. You give immunity to me and Tony, ‘cause he didn’t do anything wrong, and I’ll tell you whatever. Anything you want, the whole thing, but you have to promise me we won’t go to jail.”

She probably weighs 90 pounds. She’s digging her nails into her arm now, and her lip’s bleeding, and Fury doesn’t have the heart to tell her that her boyfriend’s probably not gonna make it as far as the weekend, much less jail, so he shrugs.

“OK. You and Tony. Full immunity, if you can give us the guy.”

She doesn’t hesitate this time. She lets go her death grip on her own arm and sticks her bony hand awkwardly across the table, and Fury, whose shoes have junkie shit on them and who hasn’t slept in two days, shakes it, feeling the dusty coffee kick in behind his skull.

“OK,” she says, and Detective Hill clicks down on _RECORD._

\- - - - - 

The ID card they found in Father Stane’s safe said Virginia, but her name is Pepper, and it has been for a long time, long before she got to the farm. Before she knew any of her real family’s names, she was Pepper—long-legged, flat-haired Pepper, Mr. Potts’ middle daughter, the one who was going to be an artist until she made it to high school and found out that after all those afternoons in the Art Institute she couldn’t paint to save her life. So she made a new plan. She still remembers the train she took the night after graduation, her seat sticky with something the last rider spilled, so she took a hanky out of her bag and spread it over the vinyl and sat awake all night and into the morning. It wasn’t the kind of ride you slept through.

She called her father on a pay phone at Union Station, swaying a little from 14 hours with only some crackers and an orange Nehi. She told him she’d gotten in safe, and she’d call him back. That was four years ago, and she hasn’t talked to him since.

The first two months with Cheryl weren’t what she expected, but then nothing was. She knew she wasn’t the only 17 year old who’d decided she could make a life in movies, but she hadn’t been prepared for just how _many_ of them had come up with her own plan, so of course, the plan changed. She went to a few auditions, argued with Cheryl’s landlord over the hot water (yes, it _was_ rusty, no, that was _not_ legal), read for the part of the girl who dies first in the monster movie, argued with Cheryl over the rent (no, she couldn’t pay it _all_ ), and finally landed a good, steady job managing a shift at the all-night diner in Hesperia and moved out of Cheryl’s tiny second bedroom.

It wasn’t what she’d planned, but Los Angeles wasn’t Chicago and she wasn’t Georgia O’Keefe, and her new apartment was, if older and smaller than Cheryl’s, at least hers. She was making her way, Pepper Potts, and the diner ran smoother every night from 7 PM when she walked in the door to 6 AM when she slipped off her shoes and went to wait for the bus in her canvas sandals.

She remembers a lot from that year—Mr. Blevins, who always wanted a roast beef sandwich and chocolate milk; the woman with three children and no patience who threw a fit because her hamburger wasn’t vegetarian; the group of teenagers so high they accidentally tipped her 20 dollars on a 5-dollar meal—but she’s never been able to remember the day she met him, which strikes her as odd. When you meet the man who changes your life, you’re supposed to feel something, but she must not have felt anything but tired that night, because she never remembered it later.

“We’ve met before, you know,” he told her the second time she saw him, as he pushed the check back over the counter with that smile of his, warm and deep and just a hair too distant.

“Really?” she asked, and to be honest she didn’t care much. She’d heard this kind of thing before, always from men, always with a bargain in the future she’d be expected to make. But this time was different—he knew her name, he knew the day she’d been working she’d been tired, worrying about her sister, thinking about buying a new pair of shoes. She rocked on her toes in the shoes she’d bought last Wednesday, and looked closer.

He was tall, the first thing you noticed about him. Then the rings, heavy, silver, two to a finger on his left hand. His beard was shorter then, trimmed almost to a businessman’s cut, and he wore a nice shirt—yellow stripes and button-down, she’d swear, as funny as that seems now. There was nothing exactly about him that made him stand out, except that smile, and maybe the way he looked at you, straight in the eye and waiting for you to blink first.

But she remembered him, and when he came back (the table in the corner every Friday night, a club sandwich and hot tea), she talked to him, learned he’d fought in the war (which war she was never sure), that he had a pilot’s license and a private farm, that he’d won and lost a fortune and learned in the end that money meant nothing without family.

Well, that made sense to Pepper.

\- - - - -  

“I don’t know if that’s true,” she comments, “about the pilot’s license. I never saw him fly any plane.”

Fury nods to Detective Hill. “Make a note to check out the pilot’s license.”

The girl’s picking at the corners of her nails, chasing blood down the length of her index finger. Fury leans over, snags a tissue from the box on the table, and hands it over to her.

“You ready to keep going?” She nods. “Okay then. What next?”

Pepper thinks for a minute, and says, “Tony.”

\- - - - - 

The lab is toast.

Last time he saw it was 3 AM last night with a fucking laser show going off in his brain, firework blue sirens and bright yellow panic blotting the countertops and the shiny black window he snuck out of and fell onto the pavement. His shoulder hurts, and the pills he took before he went to work wore off around breakfast time. It’s lunchtime now, 12 o’clock by the only other fucking thing in the room they put him in, and people are calling from the school and from the news and especially from Dad’s lawyers, and what they’re all saying is that the lab is toast.

Tony understands, by extension, that his ass is equally toast, and lights a cigarette.

Back up twenty years, and Tony’s born at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center to the man who’s going to win World War III and his soft-spoken wife, who the papers don’t know yet is quiet all the time because she’s too drunk to think. Average kid till three, builds a circuit board, shipped off to private school where one kid tells him he’s a faggot and another tells him he’s a retard and everyone else tells him he’s his father’s son, which seems to mean a different thing every time they say it. Tony skips class when he can, learns to smoke better than his old man, and grows about a foot and a half in seven years.

Getting into Caltech only takes a year of screaming and two separate promises to shoot himself in the mouth if he doesn’t get in, but he makes it: class of ’68 at age 14. Four years at the top of every class except Western Civ (because fuck Western Civ), and it’s his last semester and the day after the fire they send the actual president of the California Institute of Technology in to tell Tony that after some internal discussion they’ve decided not to press charges, but he’s hereby expelled from the school. Somebody’s already at his dorm picking up his stuff, and he’s not to set foot on school property again. Also, his dad’s on the phone.

Tony’s dad never calls unless he’s got something worth saying, like Tony’s a waste of space or his allowance is cut off or he’s sending him to a mental institution tomorrow morning. Like he should have sent Mom before Tony was born, he adds helpfully. Tony’s always admired the guy’s dedication to righting old wrongs.

He loses Dad’s escort in the bathrooms at the train station and spends the next two days hanging out at the observatory in Griffith Park, which is where he learns the universe is absolutely terrifying when you’re tripping. On the second day, a janitor finds him locked in a bathroom stall on the lower level. Tony tries to explain to the guy how important he is that he stay in there so that everything can go back to normal size, but apparently it’s closing time, so he yanks Tony out by his collar, gets his shoes puked on, and that’s the second bathroom in two days that Tony’s made a not-so-daring escape from.

This time, he’s actually thinking with more than two neurons, or something, because he finds a phonebook in the back of a convenience store, and calls up Rhodey Rhodes.

Rhodey Rhodes is not his real name, but when they were introduced at a frat party in Tony’s freshman spring, Tony instantly decided that James was too pedestrian a name for somebody so self-evidently cool, and dubbed him Rhodey, a name somewhat less inventive than what he might have come up with had he not been two shots away from collapsing face-down in Blake Dawson’s downstairs toilet.

It was not a meeting likely to produce fast friendship, but in gratitude for fishing him out of the toilet and forcing him to drink several cups of coffee in lieu of calling an ambulance Tony offered Rhodey ten thousand dollars and his services as an advanced physics tutor. Rhodey dismissed the money out of hand but accepted the second offer upon learning that this scrawny white freshman was already in graduate coursework. In their first session Tony, for his part, discovered that Rhodey Rhodes was not, like everyone else he had encountered at Caltech, a complete idiot, and the agreement between the two quickly developed into Tony’s first actual friendship. For Rhodey’s final year at Caltech, the two had been famously inseparable, and now, eighteen months out and still smelling faintly of chemical smoke, Tony rings Rhodey up and announces that shit has hit the fan.

Two years of friendship with Tony Stark have primed Rhodey to accept this announcement with grace. “What do you need?” is all he says.

What Tony needs, mainly, is his father to have used a fucking condom or left his mom alone, but in the meantime he could use a place to sleep and possibly a meal or two, seeing as Dad’s gonna cancel all his credit cards for sure when he finds out Tony’s run away again. The former, as Rhodey points out drily, is out of his hands, but he readily agrees to set Tony up with the rest. He tells him it’ll be good to see him, and Tony, who hasn’t slept in two days and wants very badly to be as high as he was when he saw Saturn’s rings up close, feels something squeeze alarmingly in his chest.

He spends the better part of the next six months on Rhodey’s couch, living off bananas, gin, and two enormous jars of Peter Pan peanut butter, running with Rhodey’s crew, and periodically getting fantastically high in the apartment’s tiny windowless bathroom. The papers kick up a short-lived fuss over Howard Stark’s missing arsonist son, the tabloids claim he was kidnapped by Red China, and Tony’s new life as a free spirit appears to be going perfectly until an incident involving eight grams of coke, a window, and Tony’s right hand rips a sizable hole in the tranquility of the household. Rhodey pays Tony’s hospital bill, makes him promise to shape up, and teaches him how to fix window glass, a skill which Tony prudently refrains from pointing out will probably never benefit him again.

Three days later, he forgets that he’s shaping up and takes some pills to kill the boredom while Rhodey’s at work. He wakes up at the bottom of Rhodey’s shower, and the next morning Rhodey informs him that he’s not gonna wait around for the day he comes home to Tony dead on the couch. Tony agrees and promises to shape up for real this time, and Rhodey shakes his head.

“I’m not kidding, Tony.”

And he’s not—Rhodey never is, come to think of it. So Tony’s on the street again, at 11 AM on a Tuesday, with no money, no pills, and nowhere in particular he feels like going.

For a long time, he didn’t know why it was he met Father Stane that same night, but now it’s obvious. Fate, karma, Mars opposite Cancer in the fifth house; the point is, maybe he didn’t know where he was, but Father Stane did. Father Stane found him, and Father Stane brought him home, carried through the night on a warm, solid shoulder that smelled of sandalwood.

\- - - - -

“So he’s the one who introduced you to Stane?”

She hesitates, then nods. “He—knew him.” Fury notices the hesitation, and yeah, he’s read the reports, he knows the guy was up to no fucking good, he knows the kind of kid that kind of guy picks up. The queer kind, to be fucking frank. He feels sorry for this girl.

“You met him at the diner, too?” She nods again.

“They both started coming in, on the weekends. Friday night, usually.”

“And eventually, what, they invite you out to this, this farm?”

“I went out on a Sunday, I think. I remember, I had the day off. And it was—” She stops, frowning, and looks at him for real for the first time since they came in. “You have to understand, it wasn’t like that at first. It was just a farm. There were people there, just good normal people living their lives.”

She’s pleading, and Fury gets it, sure—nothing ever starts out like this. Doesn’t change the fact that he’s got two kids and a baby in intensive care and a fucking maniac on the loose, all because of her farm and its good people.

“So they take you out to happy valley—you meet the others then, or was that later?”

She winces at happy valley, but she nods, then shakes her head. “Yes—no. Most of them. All but Steve.”

“The kid in the ICU? The blond one?” She bites her lip, looking like he just accused her of murder, and fuck, they’re just kids.

“Steve showed up a few months after I moved out there,” she says. “He said he left the army.” She shrugs. “I think we all knew he was sixteen.”

\- - - - -

Steve Rogers is fifteen, and not all that big for his age, when he lies straight-faced to a tired recruiting officer that he’s seventeen and a half and gets his papers signed to ship out for basic training in Arizona. If anyone asks after the fact, he will point out that at the time he was only six weeks shy of his sixteenth birthday, so the lie wasn’t quite as big as it seems at face value.

A train carries him and six other recruits down the backbone of the Rockies from Rathdrum, Idaho to the training ground near Flagstaff, and Steve, who’s never been on a train before, gets sick in the tiny metallic toilet stall. Dumped onto the sun-blasted sand in Arizona, he promptly burns, a stinging, pink tribute to his Irish ancestors. The sunburn gives him a constant headache and peels dramatically after the first week, but it’s better preparation for the jungle than any of the frenetic exercises he and the other recruits are screamed through in the ten weeks they spend in the desert.

Vietnam is exactly what Steve, whose family never had a TV and only rarely got the newspaper, assumed it would be—confusing, and far away. Nobody seems to know quite what’s going on, or why they’re there, and most of the guys in his unit appear to have taken fucking and drinking as their directive. Steve, whose sexual experience is limited to a peck on the cheek from his friend Peggy and a very strange feeling in his pants when Tony Curtis came on screen in the little movie theater behind the old hotel on Main Street, keeps to himself and fills a memorandum book with sketches of odd trees and people running.

He prays every night, but he’s found that prayers are shorter and less comforting now that he’s stopped asking God to bless Mom and Dad. He knows, of course, about praying for your enemies, but after the fifth dislocated shoulder and his stomach aching from days locked in his room to keep him from the devil, he decided he’d rather be swallowed by the flames of hell than ask for blessing for his father. So he sticks to three Hail Marys before bed, and tries not to think too much about the flames of hell.

Hell finds him, of course—it’s a war, after all, and Steve, who could barely hold his own in a fistfight back in Rathdrum, picks up his rifle and waits for the inevitable bullet that’s bound to catch him in the belly. Ironically, though, it’s not a bullet that sends him home, but the cough that settles in his lungs about a week after he sees Rudy Martin’s legs blown off.

So it’s August, and only four months since he snuck out of his parent’s garage with his knapsack and sketchpad, and Steve’s in a hospital bed staring out the window at an LA sky, with a freckled nurse in a candy-striped uniform changing his IV bag every few hours. His chest feels like someone mixed bloody cement in it and sometimes the fever casts a weird glare on things, but it’s not that bad; he’s been sicker when he was little, and he feels stupid lying here in California instead of across the ocean like he’d planned.

He spends two weeks in the hospital, courtesy of the U.S. Army, and when he’s finally released the Army politely informs him that that’s the last thing they’ll be doing for him. An overworked recruiting officer in rural Idaho might have let in a 90-pound flat-footed asthmatic through, but now that Steve’s revealed the mistake, the Army’s going to correct it. So ex-Private Rogers, just sixteen and still coughing quite a lot, walks out into west LA with fifteen dollars in his pocket and no idea where to go from here.

He finds a corner store and spends half of the first dollar on a Hershey’s bar and a bottle of cough syrup, and then, because it’s 3 PM and he’s got nowhere else to be, spends another buck fifty on the next movie playing at the theater across the street. He walks out into twilight a few hours later, drowsy from cough syrup and low lights, and figures he ought to find somewhere to sleep.

The weather in California is constant, nothing like the murderous winters he’s used to back in Idaho, and Steve spends the next six months sleeping in church doorways and bus stations and at the long tables in the public library on sunny afternoons. He washes dishes in more diners than he can count and carries his bottle of cough syrup in his jacket pocket, and on Christmas Day he takes the bus out to the beach and sits with a Coke watching the waves run in and out under a full sky.

It’s just before Easter when he wanders into a tiny restaurant in Silver Lake hoping they’ve got dishes he can wash; it’s been over a day since he’s eaten and Steve always gets shaky and sick when it goes that long between meals. The place smells of crushed cilantro and vinegar and berry pie, and Steve blushes when his stomach actually rumbles as he steps inside.

“Looking for someone?” the waitress asks, because Steve’s standing on the spot waiting for the manager to materialize and hoping he won’t faint. He blinks darkness out of his eyes and turns to answer her, but doesn’t get a chance, because as soon as he turns around the girl in the apron drops her pile of menus and runs to throw her arms around him.

“ _Steve_ ,” she says, loud in his ear, then pulls back to look at him. She’s laughing, and she’s two years older than the last time he saw her, but Steve knows her right away. Nat left town at the end of their sophomore year, headed to Boise with her boyfriend and a promise never to come back, but Steve had missed her, sitting alone in the cafeteria every day. He used to draw pictures on napkins to make her laugh, and now she’s here, in California, an inch taller than him and laughing again while she squeezes his hands tight and looks him up and down.

“You look _terrible_ ,” she tells him, never one for half-truths, and Steve remembers why he’s there.

“I can wash dishes,” he says, and Nat laughs again, cupping her hand in the shaggy hair at the back of his neck.

“I’m sure,” she says, “but for now how about just lunch?”

She leads him back into the kitchen, introduces him to a man with sandals and very energetic eyebrows, and fills a plate with more food than Steve’s seen in one place since last Wednesday: salad, some sort of brownish rice, a roll, peaches, and a crumbling slice of pie on the side. His face is meeting the edge of the plate before he’s quite conscious of having picked up the fork she held out, and he has to be stern with himself and try to slow his bites down.

“When was the last time you ate?” Nat asks incredulously, staring at him from the other side of the table, and Steve gulps down his bite unchewed to croak that it was Sunday. Nat frowns and tells him he’s too skinny. Steve shrugs, chewing again, and she gives him another smile, that tiny twist in the corner of her mouth he missed so much when she left.

“Finish that,” she says, “and I’ve got something to show you.” Steve raises his eyebrows and manages to force out an inquisitive squeak around a mouthful of bread and blueberries, and Nat’s smile grows. “You’ll see,” is all she says.

When her shift ends at five, she takes him out to her ancient Ford pickup and drives out of the city into the hills, taking back roads and canyon bridges into the early evening, radio tapping out a gritty song while Nat tells Steve what happened to the boyfriend she left home with and Steve tells her where he’s been these past ten months. Just as the sun’s setting over the hills, they roll down the long, twisting dirt road that leads up to the farm.

Nat parks underneath a giant camphor tree and hops out of the cab, walking around to help Steve get the rusty passenger side door open. She takes his hand, tells him not to look so scared, and leads him up to the house to meet his family.

 


	2. Out Here in the Fields

2.

The farm sits in the gentle slope between low hills, a circle of lemon and almond trees drawn up around a huge old farmhouse full of windows and soft light. There’s no barn, no silo—nothing like the farms Steve knows from back home. There’s no field raking long lines of potato plants off towards the horizon, just a grassy yard for chickens and goats to wander, and a garden out behind the house where fat tomatoes climb the same poles as the string beans and fresh green onions spring out of the flowering oregano bush. Father Stane, Steve learns, doesn’t believe in tying up living things.

Where Steve comes from, you bust your ass all day just to get dinner on the table, and even then it doesn’t always take: Steve’s dad came home at 11 every night and he can still remember lots of weekends sitting in the dark because the power got cut off. He doesn’t think he had a full belly till he went to the army. Here, though, everyone works together, and everyone gets enough. Every morning, he and Nat and a boy called Clint go out into the garden and pick an empty kitchen bowl full of strawberries, and at breakfast they can eat all they want. Supper at the farm is even better—at home, Steve’s mom peeled open the dinner trays and Steve put napkins at everyone’s place, but here everyone cooks together, barefoot in the high-ceiling kitchen, taking the food they grew in the earth and turning it into a meal big enough to feed the whole family.

And it’s a big family. There’s Thor, six foot five with shoulders that could break wood, leaning against the stove with his hair tied back out of the steam, eating half a tomato so fresh it’s dripping juice and salt down his tanned wrist. There’s Nat, a head shorter and amazingly quick with a knife, cutting mushrooms at the table with the setting sun in her hair. There’s Clint, who’s almost as skinny as Steve and has the foulest mouth he’s ever heard, sitting cross-legged on the countertop peeling a potato, sending his hair out of his eyes with sharp puffs of breath and grinning big at every stupid joke Nat tells. There’s Pepper, with light red hair down to her waist and freckles on her nose, rinsing out rice at the deep kitchen sink, swaying a little to her own whistling. There’s Bruce, who never says much, stirring the pot on the stove and checking his watch, and of course there’s Steve, moving around the kitchen whenever he’s told, watching the piles of vegetables they brought in from the back turn into dishes he’s never dreamed of.

The first time Steve cooks with them, Thor teaches him how to cut up a bell pepper, scooping the seeds and laying the pepper into four neat quarters, and Steve can’t believe how gentle his enormous hands feel on his own. Clint shows him how to hold a potato peeler, and the two of them race, shredding the coarse brown skin off as fast as they can, sticky circles of potato flying to stick on the wall and the floor and Steve’s bare shins. Clint wins, but Steve doesn’t mind—how could he possibly, when he’s sitting in sunlight with his whole family laughing and talking around him, the smell of warm bread and fresh food filling the room.

The one exception to the work rule is Tony, who sits and watches them all with his feet up on the table and a cigarette in his mouth, burning tiny scraps of paper into vanishing butterflies of ash. Tony is twenty, four years older than Steve, and Father Stane’s favorite; he calls him son and Tony is the only one on the farm who gets to eat without working for it. Steve’s a little confused by that, but nobody else seems to object, so he doesn’t worry about it.

They eat around the huge oak table in the shady dining room, with paper lanterns and candles lighting the room and air coming in from the yard through the open windows. Clint talks with his mouth full and Thor’s laughs shake the table and Tony smokes through dinner, the smell of his cigarettes blending with food and incense and filling the room with a newly familiar warmth that Steve breathes in like he’ll never get enough. Father Stane sits at the head of the table, tall but not imposing, smiling at his family spread out around him and telling them all how well they’ve done today, making this meal out of the work of the earth. Steve’s never known a man that big to be so gentle.

When dinner’s finished and they’ve washed all the dishes and laid them out to dry in the warm evening air, Father Stane takes them into the family room and everyone lies down on the cushions laid out over the smooth wood floor. He tells him about when he was a boy, and everyone told him _go there_ and _come here_ and never told him he was a child of the universe. He tells them about hell, which is called Germany, where men kill each other because other men told them to, and forget that they’re born of the earth and meant for the stars. He tells them how glad he is that they found their way here, and to be grateful to the earth and the stars for leading them home to him. Steve lies on his belly between Nat and Clint and feels like every word is for him, and then finds it’s true when Father Stane holds out his hand and tells everyone to welcome their new brother, Steve, who came to them all the way across the ocean from hell. Father Stane lays his hands on Steve’s shoulders, and one by one everyone around the room steps forward to hug him and tell him welcome, and just like that, Steve’s got a family.

In bed that night, listening to Thor snore and feeling the breeze brush in from the branches of the mulberry tree outside, he can still feel their hands on his skin.

\- - - - - 

The bed is too hot; it’s always too fucking hot to sleep. Tony’s suggested a thousand times that there’s an invention called the goddamn fan, but Father Stane doesn’t want to pay an electric bill or something, like it’s a sin. That’s fine for him, but Tony can never fall asleep when Father Stane blows out the candle and settles down in the dark to snore right into Tony’s ear. Sometimes he lies there anyway, but tonight his legs are jittery and his brain’s babbling at him, so he sits up and scoots away from Father Stane’s heavy, sighing back to sneak down the groaning stairs and out onto the porch for a nice midnight smoke.

He’s been doing this since he came to the farm, back when it was just him and Father Stane and the professor from City College who never talks, but the family’s grown since then, and when he kicks open the screen door and steps out onto the tired boards of the porch he discovers he’s not alone. The blond kid, the new one, is hunched over at the far end of the porch, hugging his knees to his chest, and as he gets closer Tony realizes that oh, shit, he’s crying, isn’t he. That’s crying, for sure. Tony just wanted a quiet goddamn smoke.

The kid hears him and starts scuffling frantically at his face with his hands, and Tony, who isn’t gonna let a little crying ruin his smoke, flops down to lean against one of the flaking gray pillars and light up.

“What’s up,” he asks, because he’s curious, okay—the kid (Steve?) can’t be older than fifteen at the most, and he just turned up out of nowhere. Tony heard him saying yesterday that he was in Vietnam, which _has_ to be the biggest load of bullshit, because, again, _fifteen_ , but Tony’s just as interested in a kid who thinks being in Vietnam is a better lie than whatever he was actually mixed up with. It’s not like any of them are exactly angels here—he’s a pyro, Bruce is a deserter, Nat used to be a hooker before she started tossing actual salads, Clint will freely tell you he never ate anything he didn’t steal from ’62 to ’68, and even though he won’t say anything about home Tony’s pretty damn sure Thor killed a guy back in Connecticut. So the point is, whatever Steve’s skeleton is, he’s got a pretty big friendly closet to hide it in with them.

Steve, if that’s his name—Tony’s memory isn’t always the best these days—shakes his head, and mumbles “sorry” into his knees. Tony, stretched out and content, gives him an encouraging kick.

“Come on. What’s the matter, what’s so bad? I’m not gonna tell on you,” he points out. “Nobody cares here.”

Steve shakes his head again. “It’s not—” His voice cracks, and he tries again. “It’s not like that. I—I got a letter.”

“What, here?” Tony didn’t even know they had a mailbox.

“In the army,” Steve corrects himself, and Tony feels like that was a little misleading, but the kid’s very sad, so okay. He’ll roll with it.

“So what, what’d it say?”

“That my mom died.”

“Shit.” Tony nearly drops his cigarette. “That’s not a nice letter.”

Steve shrugs. “She was—she wasn’t—I mean, she wasn’t always the nicest. To me, I mean. I thought I’d be happy to get away from her. But—” He’s crying again. “I didn’t mean to leave her alone with _him_ , I didn’t know she’d, she’d, I don’t know, it didn’t say what happened but I don’t think, I don’t think I should’ve gone, I was just _mad_ and now she’s—” He chokes, retches a little, and smacks his face down into his knees again to cry quietly.

Tony, moved to kindness by an excess of discomfort, offers Steve a cigarette. Steve takes it, sits precariously still while Tony lights it, and coughs so hard he nearly falls off the porch. Tony, faintly alarmed, reclaims the cigarette and sticks it in the free corner of his mouth, then scoots across the scratched planks to sit next to Steve and thump his skinny back. After a few good whacks, Steve lets out an angry little squawk and tries to hit Tony, so Tony figures he’s done the job. He sits back, grabbing his own ankles and staring up at the cloudy night.

“It’s stupid,” Steve announces hoarsely. “Forget it. It was weeks ago. I don’t know why—it was a long time ago.”

Tony shrugs. “Honestly, I thought you hated them both.” Or maybe that’s just Tony; he never can keep track. When somebody else likes their parents he tends to assume that’s just bullshit for someone else’s benefit. Nobody really _likes_ their parents anymore, do they?

“I stopped praying for her,” Steve admits in a strangled whisper, and Tony laughs out loud before he realizes that wasn’t meant to be a joke. Steve hides his face again, and Tony remembers that this kid wears a silver cross around his fucking neck.

“So, what, you’re a murderer?” he asks. Steve doesn’t answer, but he starts to rock again, and Tony is way too sober for this conversation. “Look, Steve—Steve? Steve. I haven’t been to church since I was, uh, Christmas in Italy, 1953? I think I was four. I had a bow tie. Point is, I’m not exactly an expert, but I’m pretty sure I don’t remember _Thou shalt not not pray_. If that’s the rule I’m definitely going to hell, because I’ve never prayed for anybody in my life. No offense, Steve, but if you’re a murderer I’m Adolf Hitler, and my parents would both be dead.”

It’s a shitty pep talk, but Steve’s stopped crying, for which Tony is profoundly grateful. He’s looking at Tony, wiping his eyes, and after a minute which Tony spends enjoying the silence and his two cigarettes he asks, “Do you like your mom and dad?”

“Fuck, no. Don’t be crazy, crazy boy.”

They sit in silence for a few minutes, watching the sky and listening to the countryside click and warble and all the other creepy things the country does at night. Tony wants a goddamn rifle any time he sits out here past ten. But Steve, who might be from some kind of pre-modern farming village based on the accent alone, seems to actually like it. He leans back against the graying post and closes his eyes, which seems like a dangerous amount of comfort with his surroundings, but Tony doesn’t begrudge him after that crying jag.

“At least,” Steve says after a very long time, “at least you’ve got Father Stane.”

Tony raises an eyebrow. “Wha’dyou mean?”

“Well,” Steve says, “I mean—if you didn’t like your dad—you’ve got him, now. Isn’t that better?”

Tony stares for a second, then laughs so hard he falls backwards and almost swallows his cigarettes. The back of his skull connects with wood, and it feels better than anything he’s felt in weeks, like he’s got a whole new lease on life, because Steve the crazy peasant kid thinks that Obadiah Stane is Tony’s surrogate father. Tony laughs till he can’t get enough breath in, then rolls onto his aching stomach and looks up at Steve, who looks like he swallowed a frog and can’t think of a polite way to eject it.

“Buddy,” he pants, “Steve, buddy, pal. He’s not—he’s, we’re, he’s my—he’s fucking me, Steve. Steve, we sleep together. Same bed, same room, how did you not— _Steve._ ” Steve is brick red and looks almost terrified. He whispers in a hoarse, wounded tone that he thought Tony and Father Stane just slept in the same room.

“Like me and Thor,” he explains, and Tony has to duck his head to the porch boards again to keep himself from going off again. He’s going to live off the purity of this moment for the next lifetime.

For the moment, he rocks up onto his knees and gropes in the dark for the cigarettes he dropped earlier. He offers the shorter one to Steve, a peace offering for the guy who gave him his first real laugh in months, and Steve, who appears to be stunned for the moment, takes it and holds it in two hands like a very tiny candle. Tony lights the other, gets to his feet, and claps Steve on the shoulder.

“Don’t worry about parents, crazy kid,” he tells him. “You’re here now. You don’t need them.”

He leaves Steve hunched over on the porch and retraces his creaking steps up the stairs and across the bedroom to the drawer where Father Stane keeps his pills. He takes a couple, washes them down with the musty water sitting on the windowsill, and slips back into bed. The mattress is finally cool where he left it an hour ago, and when he closes his eyes, he can almost imagine the steady, ugly snoring is the sound of traffic on the freeway, drowning out the frogs and the crickets and making everything right.

\- - - - -

Even with damnation hovering over his head, Steve finds that life on the farm agrees with him like nothing’s ever agreed with him in his life. It’s not just the bed every night and never feeling shaky from missing dinner, or even the roof over his head when one of California’s Noah-and-the-Ark rains hits late one afternoon, though he’s happy about all that—Pepper makes popcorn in the big copper pot and they lie on cushions around the family room trading stories while the rain roars against the windows and thunder rolls over the roof. Clint tells about the foster parents he ran away from when he was seven, the ones who gave their five year old daughter three birthday parties in one week and used to beat him if he picked his nose. Tony, without picking up his head from where it’s nestled on Pepper’s lap, tells about the time he decided to run away to Australia and got as far as LAX with a suitcase full of his mother’s jewelry, a jar of mercury from his dad’s lab, and as many bananas as he could fit before their chauffeur caught up with him. Steve, at Nat’s insistence, tells the story of the fight he won when he was eight by sneezing unexpectedly into the other kid’s face. It was, Steve insists, an accident, but this doesn’t stop everyone in the room from howling with laughter, and it’s _that_ that makes Steve’s heart boil over with contentment so endless he thinks he could rest in it forever.

Good food and steady work draw the cough out of his chest at last, and when Nat learns about the headaches he’s been getting since the hospital she brings back aspirin from town, and all of a sudden the world’s in all its right colors again, so exactly the way he remembers it from when he was little that he’s surprised he didn’t noticed the change. One day he and Thor take the trail that leads up the canyon behind the farm and see an eagle coasting through the blue sky, and in the evenings Bruce starts teaching him the algebra he missed at the end of school, with occasional spirited interruptions from Tony. 

Other people come and go, staying for dinner or for the night, sometimes even a week or more. None of them come happy—there’s a girl named Helen who only speaks a little English and helps Steve milk a goat in nervous silence, a girl with blonde curls who won’t tell anyone her name, and a tall black boy named Sam who smiles like the sun and shows Steve the plastic foot they put on him when he came back from Vietnam. None of them come happy, but at the dinner table, under Father Stane’s gentle eye, everyone finds peace.

He’s not sure what to make of Father Stane—or maybe he’s just not sure Father Stane likes him. He almost never talks to Steve after that first night, in fact he barely ever looks at him, but Steve reminds himself that he almost never talks to anyone who isn’t Tony. It’s just the way he is, and as long as he’s got Nat and Clint and Thor and the others Steve’s content to be grateful to Father Stane, and to the earth and the stars even, and maybe to God, for giving them all a home.

He’s been there for nearly a month, and almost gained five pounds, when the first thing happens that makes him worry. It’s an ordinary day when he wakes up, and when he and Nat sneak down to the end of the garden and snack on raw green beans while the sun comes up. It’s at breakfast that things change. Everyone’s talking and laughing like usual, stealing pancakes off of each other’s plates, but there’s something missing, something that Steve can’t place for a while, until it hits him—Tony’s cigarette smoke. Tony isn’t smoking this morning; he’s not eating either, just sitting next to Father Stane with his hands clasped behind his head, staring down at his empty plate.

Nobody else seems to notice anything, but Steve can tell something’s wrong. After breakfast, instead of following Steve out to the yard to lecture him in theoretical physics while he feeds the chickens, Tony lies down in the family room, curled into a ball like he’s cold even though it’s eighty degrees in the shade. But still, nobody notices: Nat and Pepper take the truck down to the city to their jobs and Bruce rides along because he’s teaching this afternoon, which leaves Thor fixing the roof of the shed behind the house and Clint trying to make a bow and arrow out of sticks he found in the yard, and Father Stane sitting out on the back porch, sleeping with an open book on his lap.

Steve knows something isn’t right, but he can’t tell what, and if nobody else is worried it seems stupid to work himself up over something that isn’t there, so he takes his notebook and sits down in the shade of the lemon trees to draw the goats—which is how he ends up missing the start of the yelling. He’s cross-legged and bent low to the paper, squinting up at the house to get the curve of the little goat’s leg just right, when suddenly somebody’s screaming at the back of the house, and it’s Tony, and Steve throws down his paper and pencil and runs.

When he gets there, Thor’s already beat him: he’s holding Tony by the elbows from behind, pulling him away from Father Stane, who doesn’t look so much mad as a little disappointed at the noise Tony’s making. He’s screaming, kicking backwards at Thor’s legs and begging for something, but Steve can’t tell what, and as he stands dumbly at the corner of the house Father Stane stands up, cups Tony’s face to say something too quiet for Steve’s lousy ears, and then disappears inside. Tony screams one more time, the loudest noise Steve thinks he’s ever heard out of a person, and then lurches in Thor’s arms and vomits off the edge of the porch. Thor lowers him down carefully and pats Tony’s back while he gags. He’s frowning, but even now there’s no surprise on his face, no confusion: whatever’s happening, Thor knows about it, and Steve doesn’t, and it’s his turn to feel very cold in the August sunlight.

Thor carries Tony into the house, and Steve doesn’t see him again until that evening, when everyone comes inside to make dinner and Tony’s back in the family room, curled up again with a towel stretched out on the cushions under his head. Steve’s about to go in to talk to him when Nat catches his arm and drags him out to look at the new shed roof with her.

Later, though, they’re making dinner, and Clint’s in the middle of arguing that the tomato he picked looks _exactly_ like Thor’s mother’s ass when he’s interrupted by Tony’s voice from the other room.

“ _I don’t wanna die_.”

Everyone freezes for a minute, and Tony starts saying it again, and again, _I don’t wanna die I don’t wanna die Jesus I don’t wanna die_ , in this high desperate voice, and nobody’s looking at anyone else anymore. Clint’s tomato finds its way back to the bowl with the others, and Nat and Thor exchange a glance Steve can’t read, and Pepper quietly slips out of the kitchen and across the hall to the family room, and a few minutes later Tony goes quiet again.

Steve can’t stand it. “What’s wrong with him?” he demands, and Nat gives him the look she gives people who ask stupid questions.

It’s Clint, to Steve’s surprise, who answers. “He’s a junkie, dumbass.”

“But _why_ —he was fine yesterday, what happened?” He knows Tony takes drugs, he’s not stupid, but this isn’t that—this is something else, and nobody wants to tell him until Bruce finally speaks up from the corner.

“Stane doesn’t like it.” He shrugs. “It’s detox.”

“So he’ll be better soon?” Steve asks, and he can tell before he’s finished the question that Tony won’t be better soon, that there’s still something he’s missing in all this.

“It’s just for today, Steve,” Nat tells him, in the voice she uses when she’d like to stop talking now, “look, it’s just between them. Don’t get involved, okay? Trust me. He’ll be better tomorrow.”

Steve’s about to ask _why_ again, because none of this makes any sense to him, but Pepper comes back just then to refill the jar of water, and Bruce gives him a look that says _keep your mouth shut now_ , and Steve’s had that look enough times from guys Bruce’s size to do exactly that. He shuts his mouth and chops up the potato Thor throws to him, and when Tony doesn’t show up for dinner he doesn’t say anything or ask Father Stane, who’s chewing away like nothing’s wrong, why Tony has to be sick for a day just because he’s hooked on drugs and Father Stane doesn’t like it.

He doesn’t do any of that, but he wants to. He doesn’t like the cold feeling that’s running through his stomach today, or the quiet around the table with Tony gone. The conversation’s subdued, and it breaks down entirely halfway through dinner when Tony starts retching loudly in the far room. Pepper gets up again, but Father Stane calmly tells her to sit down.

“It’s all right,” he says, while the noise continues. “It’s all right. Sit down.” And Pepper does, and before too long it’s quiet and everyone starts to talk again.

He doesn’t see Tony again that night; by the time the dishes are cleared and the kitchen clean, Tony’s disappeared from the family room, along with Father Stane, and by now Steve knows better than to try and ask. Nat sees he’s worried, because she comes alongside him and squeezes his hand and promises again that Tony will be much better tomorrow. And Steve thinks he believes her—he trusts all of them, really, he does. But the sick feeling hasn’t gone away, and when he goes to bed that night he prays for the first time since he’s been here.

It’s not a sophisticated prayer. It starts and finishes _keep us safe._

\- - - - -

Tony wakes up, blinking crusted sweat out of his eyes, and has a few really wonderful moments to float in the haze of waking before he has to decide whether the pain in his stomach or his head is less bearable. He sits up into sunlight, and decides it’s head—definitely, no contest, Jesus fuck.

Yesterday is a blur, which he’s used to, and honestly fine with, based on the state of his abdominal muscles; whatever he was doing yesterday, he’d probably pay money not to remember it, and he’s got it for free. He finds the glass of water next to the window, spills most of it on the pillow, his fucking hands are useless, and downs the rest in one not very satisfying go. He can’t remember ever being this thirsty.

He’s putting the glass back when he notices the two little yellow pills sitting in the dust on the windowsill, and honestly, he could cry. He could cry, but he doesn’t. He dry swallows those fuckers and puts a blanket on his head to go downstairs and find some water.

Nobody’s in the kitchen, so it must be about the middle of the day, judging from general light and noise, none of which Tony’s about to fuck with right now. He finds a glass by touch and fills it at the sink, emptying the first half in a single gulp and then guzzling the rest down while he stands there underneath his blanket. He fills the glass again and carries it with him out towards the back of the house, where it’s cool and he thinks he can hear birds or something.

The back porch is empty, which Tony takes as an invitation to lie face down on the cool wood. The pills aren’t kicking in yet, which feels like a big problem, but he tells himself to wait and see, it’ll take a minute to push through this fucking headache and pretty soon he’ll be okay again, if he just lies still and lets everything work.

“Hey,” somebody says, and if he could sit up Tony would murder them. He settles for a groan that he hopes sounds at least a little murderous. The boards creak under his face, so Somebody’s sitting down, and a second later there’s a hand on top of his head, and _ow_ , why the fuck would you do that, _OW_.

He flips over and throws off the blanket, and for a minute his whole head’s full of white fire, sparking and wheeling behind his eyes and around the head of whoever’s looking down at him. Then everything clears, and he squints towards the light, and it’s Bruce, and Tony has just enough time to dodge his hand again before it lands back on his head.

“How’re you feeling?” Bruce asks, like he’s worried. Tony would rather not talk about that, so he changes the subject.

“Don’t you have class?”

Bruce shakes his head. “Not today, it’s Wednesday. Are you okay?”

Tony shrugs. “I lived.” He puts his face back down on the boards, wiggling around to find a cool spot.

Bruce, who apparently really, really wants to be stabbed today, taps his shoulder. “Sit up for me, okay. Come on.” Tony has absolutely no intention of sitting up for anybody, man or woman, but thirty seconds later he’s sitting up with the blanket draped around his shoulders, leaning back against the cracked siding and letting Bruce look at his eyeballs.

“I hate you,” he tells Bruce, and Bruce comments mildly that he knows, and Tony should drink something.

Tony points out triumphantly that he already _did_ , and Bruce congratulates him and says in that case he should have something to eat, which is a bridge Tony isn’t ready to cross right now. Bruce insists, and Tony, who is at a physical disadvantage due both to being dizzy as fuck and to the blanket over his head, ends up at the kitchen table picking at a bowl of oatmeal with cinnamon on it, the way the cook at home used to make it.

“This looks like puke,” he tells Bruce, just so they’re both clear on where Tony’s head is.

“It’s not,” Bruce says.

Puke or not, he’s two bites in when he feels him in the doorway behind him, and puts down his spoon. Father Stane’s hands land on either side of his neck, squeezing at the bone where his shoulder meets his chest, and Tony focuses very hard on staying still and breathing normally, which is less hard than it could have been because the pills are starting to work finally.

“Glad to see you’re feeling better,” Father Stane says, leaning over to peek into Tony’s bowl. Tony just nods; his head’s a balloon on a string right now, and all he has to do is keep floating and everything will work out okay.

Father Stane puts his arm around him, and he floats up out of his chair and back out to the porch; he floats his eyelids shut so the sunlight floods through them, bright red. Father Stane’s saying something, and Tony lets the words float in and out of his ears, never touching, never standing still.

 


	3. Mike the Headless Chicken

3.

They have the wedding outside, on the side of the hill between two almond trees sticky with dead blossoms and fresh leaves. Everyone makes a circle of their hands, and wind comes down from the canyon. Pepper wears a wreath of tiny white flowers in her hair, and a dress that skims in the dust and turns pale brown from the earth up. Standing beside her in Father Stane’s old sweater, Tony goes through six cigarettes over the course of the ceremony.

Father Stane marries Nat first, bending down low to gather her up and kiss her, smiling with his whole body as he straightens up; the sun’s just coming over the treetops now, deepening the light and lifting the shadow of his body over hers. The circle tightens, and Father Stane marries Pepper, sunrise and morning wind stirring the leaves above their heads as they kiss.

They walk up the hill together still holding hands: Pepper and Nat at Father Stane’s sides, Tony following, then Thor and Bruce, Clint and Steve. They stop in the garden to gather what they need for breakfast, and return to the house to celebrate the family’s rebirth.

\- - - - -

The second day after Tony gets sick, he’s back at the table as though nothing’s happened, smoking and talking at top speed and with his mouth full. Steve thinks he’s a little pale, and he only eats a forkful of eggs and part of a banana, but he’s the same old Tony: he explains magnetostrictive delay lines to Nat with a sketch on a napkin, then burns the napkin and lets the black flakes fall onto his plate.

Life on the farm carries on as usual after that. The garden explodes with zucchini one day, and for weeks they eat almost nothing else; Tony complains that he’s gonna wake up green and stripey one morning. A truck loaded with four-by-fours shows up one day, and Thor and Bruce start building a fence around the edge of the farm, with occasional assistance from Steve, learns how to dig a hole straight down and mix concrete for Thor to pour down around the posts while Bruce holds them steady. Working out in the sun, Steve’s persistent blistering burn peels off into the barest tan around his shoulders, and his cheeks flush with freckles.

The day they start stringing wire around the posts, Tony gets sick again. It’s the same as last time—when he starts throwing up after breakfast, Bruce takes him upstairs and nobody says anything. Nat kisses Steve’s cheek and sets off for work, and Thor calls him to help with the fence, and Father Stane talks a walk up to the canyon and doesn’t come back till it’s dark. Steve sneaks up to Tony’s room while he’s gone, but Bruce sends him straight back downstairs and Steve only sees a Tony-sized ball of sheets curled up in the middle of the old king bed.

He hates it, but as time goes on he gets used to it. It’s part of life, part of what his family does, and Steve knows better than to assume that out of all of them, he knows best. There’s nobody who knows Tony better than Father Stane, and as nervous as Steve’s stomach gets on detox days, it always calms the next night when they gather in the family room and Father Stane lets Tony lean against him and tells them all how proud he is.

These are the times that feel best: when they’re all gathered together and Father Stane, who’s usually so quiet, opens his arms and looks Steve right in the eyes like he could see all the way to the sick, bitter corners of his heart, and tells him that the earth and the stars brought him here, and nobody can ever take him away. He says it smiling, with his arm around Tony, and Steve feels that smile wash through his heart and clear away the anger and the fear.

He’s relieved when first Pepper and then Nat quit their jobs in the city. The house is always full now, and while Steve never really minded the work it’s better with everyone together—Thor and Bruce digging post holes and pouring cement, the rest of them winding the stiff metal strands around each post. Pepper and Clint know the same songs, and they harmonize badly while Nat sways and nods to the sad story of dearest Nancy and Tony sits cross-legged on the grass twisting scrap wire into crazy shapes.

For years afterwards, that spring will blend together in an endless haze, with no beginning and no end to mark time in that dizzy, rainless climate. Steve’s tried to pick out individual days, but it’s impossible: there wasn’t so much as a calendar in the old farmhouse, much less a clock or a phone to draw a line into the outside world and separate day from day. They slept, they worked, and they lay in the shade with their hands touching, supported by earth and by each other. All there was was the sun, and the family.

He couldn’t tell you what evening it was—only that it was a warm, quiet night not long after the fence was finished that Father Stane gathered them in the family room and told them it was time to honor the love the family was built on.

“You’ve all loved me so long and so well,” he says, looking around at each of them, and Steve wonders if everyone feels his eyes at the back of their breastbone when he turns their way. “It’s time we show the earth what that means.” He holds out his left hand to Pepper and his right to Natasha, and tells them all that tomorrow morning they’ll hold a ceremony to marry them both to him, to celebrate the love of the family and the home that they’ve made for each other.

Steve will never forget that moment, he thinks—long after he’s discarded the rest of that spring as a funny, useless dream, he’ll still be able to remember the caught breath that froze the room in that moment. He can see every face; Clint’s eyes wide, Tony’s shut tight, Bruce’s cast towards the floor. Most of all, he remembers the light, halting breath Pepper took as Father Stane leaned towards her, his hand spread open.

She took his hand, and the stars closed over the roof of the old farmhouse.

\- - - - -

Tony spends half that spring outside getting grass down the back of his shirt, and the other half stretched out on the sweaty mattress on the second floor heaving his guts out and watching Steve’s silver cross swing over his head. The crazy kid likes to help, or something, or he still feels guilty for his mom croaking last year, because whenever Tony feels like he’s dying that cross shows up, spinning and dangling from his skinny white neck like it’s trying to get at Tony. He tries to make it stop once, and punches Steve in the throat instead. Which he does feel bad for, even if Steve’s look of hurt surprise was priceless.

He knows where Father Stane keeps his gun, folded under his undershirts in the top drawer of the dresser, but from the bed it’s hard to imagine the energy it would take to get up and walk all that way to get it, especially when just rolling over makes him puke. Besides, with his luck he’d blow his cheek off and miss his brain entirely, and then he’s the guy who has to walk around for the rest of his life with half a face and food falling out any time he tries to chew. Not to mention the thought of Father Stane bending over him to take the gun away is enough to have him dry heaving again.

“Fuck you,” he spits into the bucket Steve holds up to him, and Steve mumbles “sorry” as he dabs the washcloth that’s now more sweat than water against Tony’s forehead.

The no-drugs days are hell, but when he’s not in hell or shitting himself Tony’s actually pretty happy—just feeling alive again is enough to get him high aside from anything chemical he might have put in his system. When he’s feeling like this, it’s the easiest thing to forget about the pain and the cross and the gun in the underwear drawer. He lies underneath the mulberry tree all afternoon eating hardboiled eggs and peeling the bark till he’s covered in flaky little torches. Sometimes he falls asleep there, and dreams about flying and drowning in Rhodey’s shower and Father Stane holding him in a river somewhere while little pieces of him drift down the stream under a nuclear sun.

He’s napping under the tree the day Pepper comes to sit in the shade with him, sinking down on the opposite side of the trunk and hugging her knees to her chest. She doesn’t say anything, and for a minute Tony, who’s a little bit higher than he should be, isn’t quite sure she’s real. He rolls onto his stomach and reaches around the tree to nudge her knee, and she gives him a look. Tony shrugs, and flops back onto his back to stare up into the leaves and listen to the chickens lose their shit over dry corn for the third fucking time today.

“You know there was a headless chicken once,” he asks Pepper, because it’s weird, her not talking, and he’d like a little more confirmation that he’s not just a headless chicken himself, hallucinating a pretty girl sharing the shade with him. “Some moron out in Colorado tried to make chicken soup and just, _whop_ , head’s gone and the chicken kept on running around. It lived for, like, a year. I think they named it.” He racks his brain, but the name of the headless Colorado chicken got bleached out of there along with his old address and most of his almost-bachelor’s degree.

Pepper still doesn’t say anything, and it’s getting _creepy_ now. Tony sits up and twists around, and feels his guts drop when he realizes she’s crying—not hard, nothing ugly or out of control, just tears running down her cheeks, and now that he’s sitting up he can hear the tight, quick way she’s breathing, like she’s hurrying to do it before anybody hears.

“What, oh shit,” he offers. “Are you—what’s—shit,” he’s not _good_ at this, especially not like this, he thought she was a fucking hallucination and he’s not sure now he wouldn’t rather she was. He digs in his pocket, like he’s ever carried a fucking handkerchief, and comes up with a box of matches and fifty dollars he stole from Father Stane’s dresser, because Tony likes bringing hell down on his own head. He pockets the money again and knocks a cigarette out of his pack, lights it for her and passes it across.

Pepper hesitates for a second, then takes it. She’s a lot better than Steve; just one cough, but she’s still crying, staring straight ahead with tears spilling down over her freckles.

“Thanks,” she says, clipped and hoarse. Tony nods silently, and thinks about asking what’s the matter, but he’s the last person to help with anyone else’s problems, so he just focuses on his own cigarette and the various forms of sad vegetation growing out of the dirt at his feet, and hopes she’ll stop crying soon.

She does. She wipes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and says, without looking away from the spot in the distance she’s zeroed in on, “I missed my period.”

Tony, blessed with the other kind of anatomy, has only the vaguest and most ominous idea of what happens to girls at certain times of the month. Over the years, through conversations overheard among his mothers’ friends, remarks at parties that triggered uncouth giggles, and the briefest brush with biology in high school, he’s gathered that it’s got to do with blood, that it makes people crazy, and if anything unexpected happens it’s probably an ill omen on a par with finding a lump in your balls.

“Fuck,” he whispers. Pepper nods, and for a minute they sit in silence, listening to the chickens clucking more amiably now.

“But,” Pepper goes on, so quietly Tony has to lean over a little to hear properly. “It’s back. And I took care of it. So it’s done now. I just—I had to tell someone.”

She tips back her head so the low sunlight makes her hair glow down her back, takes one last slow, careful drag, and blows smoke up into the mulberry leaves. Then she stubs the cigarette out into the soft, rotted earth and stands, brushing bits of bark and ash from her skirt.

“Don’t tell Father Stane,” she says, and then she’s gone.

Tony doesn’t tell Father Stane. He doesn’t tell anyone—in fact, these days, he’s finding that it’s a lot better not to talk to anyone. This is new for Tony: he can’t remember ever having a teacher who didn’t eventually tell him to shut up, and at home it was every other sentence. Rhodey always told him he oughta get checked out for hemophilia of the larynx. Now, though, it’s hard to follow a conversation long enough to get anywhere, and he doesn’t trust any of these fuckers anyway, not Bruce with his stupid silent suffering or Nat who knows more than she should or Steve with his dead mom and his swinging cross and his constant fucking praying when he thinks Tony’s too dead to hear. He doesn’t trust any of them but Father Stane, and Father Stane doesn’t trust him anymore, so Tony prefers to talk to the goats, who never tell him he’s full of shit and mostly just stick out their tongues at him.

He doesn’t say anything when Nat stops eating breakfast and starts sleeping a lot. He doesn’t say anything when Clint disappears for half a day and only shows up the next morning with his eyelid swollen shut and bruises climbing his shins and arms, even though Clint refuses to say where he was, even though Tony knows that last night was the first night in months that Father Stane didn’t sleep in the creaky king bed upstairs. And he keeps his mouth shut when Father Stane announces that all medicine will be turned into him so that he can protect them from the poisons of the world, because Tony knows that his pills are already in Father Stane’s safe and as long as he’s the favorite son Father Stane won’t let anything happen to him.

He regrets it, the not talking, when Father Stane’s yelling at Steve to stand up straight and stop crying, and Steve, whose aspirin is sitting in the safe next to Tony’s pills, sobs that he’s trying and he’s sorry and he won’t have any more doubts. Steve, it turns out, can’t seem to go a day without headaches that make him trip and cry a lot, and if Tony’d _known_ that then yeah, he might have put in a word for the crazy kid, but Steve didn’t say anything and Tony didn’t know and it’s too late now. If he says anything now, that’s as good as admitting he doesn’t care about Father Stane’s plan and he just wants everyone to stop screaming and let him sleep, so he keeps his mouth shut and tries not to listen to Steve panting as he tries to stand up all the way. Father Stane tells Steve he’s only in pain because he doubted, and Steve pukes on his own shoes and Thor carries him away, and Father Stane tells Tony to get off the bed and send Pepper in to see him.

He finds her in the garden, tugging hard at a stubborn weed that keeps stripping apart in her hand without letting the root loose. She turns around when she hears him and smiles, and for a second he wonders what would happen if he just didn’t say anything. His brain’s hot soup anyway; he might have forgotten and Father Stane wouldn’t know the difference. Then he remembers Steve gasping and wailing while Thor carried him away, and his own head fucking aches so much he has to close his eyes for just a second.

“Tony?” she says, and he opens his eyes.

“He wants you.”

She stops smiling and lets the mangled weed fall down into the dirt, and stands up. Tony mumbles that he’s upstairs, and she nods and walks past him to go into the house. She brushes his shoulder as she goes, and even with dirt on her hands and knees she’s the cleanest thing in this entire place, like nothing bad could stick to her hard enough to hurt, not like Tony where it’s been burned in for years, so deep you couldn’t get it out if you chiseled the whole top layer off him.

She’s almost to the house now, and Tony doesn’t mean to talk until he does.

“I didn’t tell him.” She turns to look at him, and Tony shrugs and waves, like that’s the fucking thing to do right now. To his surprise, it makes her smile.

“Thank you,” she says, and the house swallows her.

\- - - - -

It’s ten to five when Fury gets the call.

“Hello?”

“Hi,” the guy says, and he sounds young. “Is this the right—the lady said Missing Persons Unit?”

“You got it,” Fury tells him. “You looking for someone?”

“No,” the guy says, and tells Fury a story about kids hiding in the hills, about a big farm up past Crescenta, about a big guy who talked about peace and tried to take away his wallet and the pills he brought when he stayed the night late in the winter of ‘69. “I lost a foot in Vietnam,” he tells Fury, and goes on to talk about a fence, about a note he found in his jacket pocket that he didn’t understand, about a gun in a drawer and about the dream he’s had, every night since, about bodies laid out in a yard and smoke spilling through lemon trees.

Fury isn’t in the habit of listening to dreamers, but the guy says the magic word, and it’s Tony Stark, the kid who went missing two years ago, the kid with six figures on his head and no trace since 1967, the one whose picture’s up in the post office this guy went into to send his mother a birthday present. The guy says Tony Stark is up in the hills with a possible maniac and six other kids, and Detective Fury, who was supposed to be home ten minutes ago, is taking notes.

The guy won’t say his name, but he gives Fury directions. “Get them out,” he tells him, and the line goes dead.

 


	4. Smoke Signals

4. 

The 911 call comes in at 7 o’clock on Tuesday morning from a lady in Glendale who saw smoke on her morning run. The Glendale fire department sends a truck up into the hills, tracking the dark column rising out of a hidden valley into a candy-colored sky.

At 8:16 AM, the chief fireman radios the Glendale Police Department to report eight injured and one dead, but there’s panic in his voice. None of the injuries are from the fire, which started in an outbuilding on the premises and only spread to a nearby lemon tree. But he’s got a big old house and seven people, most of them teenagers, hurt or sick or dehydrated, and one guy dead of a gunshot wound to the forehead.

And, he adds, there’s a baby, maybe two weeks old.

Reinforcements and ambulances set out for the hills, and by 2 PM the news reaches Fury’s desk in the LAPD Missing Persons Unit.

“They found the Stark kid,” he tells Detective Hill when he gets off the phone with Glendale. “Up on that farm near Crescenta. That fucking nutcase on the phone was telling the truth, it’s Stark’s kid and they’re bringing him down to Sinai now.”

“Alive?” Maria asks.

“You’d better hope.”

\- - - - - 

Steve’s never seen a pregnant lady before, but when spring deepens into summer and Nat starts swelling underneath her loose shirts she starts to avoid the rest of them, spending her mornings wandering the edge of the farm and sometimes staying in bed all day, even though Father Stane warns her there won’t be any food if she doesn’t work. She tells him that’s all right with her, but some days he pulls her out of bed anyway and makes her work in the garden alongside the rest of them, and Steve sees the protective arm she keeps around her belly, like it hurts to move with that weight there.

His headaches are a little better these days—the first month was hard, but he learned to accept the pain instead of fighting, and after that it got easier. He doesn’t have as many doubts as before, he thinks, and that’s thanks to Father Stane, who never gave up on him the whole time he lay in the dark waiting for the pain to end. These days, he can get up and move around and help the family, and that feels better than not having felt the pain in the first place.

His faith is so deep now, his head barely hurts on the day that Nat staggers into the doorway of the kitchen with her legs dripping, looking scared for the first time since Steve’s known her, and says, “Help.”

It’s a clear day, windless and hot even for August. Steve remembers the heat: the slick of sweat down his forehead when he follows Bruce and Nat into the family room; the sudden clench and shake of Nat’s thighs, scaring her so she slips in the puddle on the wood floor. Bruce settles her on cushions in the shade of the long blinds.

“I didn’t think it was real,” she whispers, so hoarsely Steve can barely hear. “It’s been hours—I thought it was, my aunt, when she had her baby her stomach hurt for days, I thought it wasn’t real—” Something inside her seems to interrupt, warping the end of her sentence into a low scream, and Bruce brushes her hair off her sticky forehead, muttering quiet encouragement.

“Call Pepper,” he says, a little louder, without turning to face Steve. “Call Thor.”

Pepper is in the yard, feeding the chickens, and Steve only has to tumble out of the house and pant Nat’s name for her to drop the bag of feed and rush past him up the porch steps. Steve steps around the chickens congratulating each other loudly on their unexpected spilled wealth and goes to find Thor.

Steve runs—not slowly, like he’s learned to since he was a little kid, but as fast and hard as he can without his legs tearing out from his body. Thor’s out at the edge of the farm today, helping Clint curl barbed wire around the top of the fence to keep out mountain lions trying to eat the goats. Steve’s bare feet pound earth, skid on dry grass, every step a hard shock to the core of his bones, and already his lungs are burning as he rockets across the farm under a hard blue sky. He thinks he’ll fall a thousand times, and then the fence comes into sight, Thor’s golden head sticking up next to Clint’s shaggy dark one, and at the last second Steve thinks he won’t be able to stop, like his frenzied body’s just going to windmill into the strung wires, caught there swinging in the breeze for the birds to pick apart.

He skids into the grass, skin burning on his shin, and stands up, gasping; it _hurts_ , enough to sting his eyes with tears, and as much as he moves his mouth he can’t get a word out. He’s going to die right here at the fence, he’s sure, and he opens his mouth to try to swallow air as he paws at his stomach and waves, frustrated, _the baby_ , _the baby’s here and you need to GO_.

Clint gets the message first. Steve’s vision twists with tears and he’s gone, running faster than Steve ever could towards the farmhouse, disappearing into the trees below the house. Two seconds later Thor follows, and Steve drops to his knees to wrestle against his frozen chest for a breath of oxygen.

He doesn’t know how long he kneels there, spinning with the earth, but eventually he finds he can heave in a tiny sliver of air, enough to haul himself up on the fence post and stagger back towards the house, a few steps at a time. He’s still yards away, and it feels like miles, when he starts to hear the screaming. For a hundred broken steps, Nat’s voice cuts through the harsh white noise of his own lungs and lands hard in his gut while he stares through tears at the blinded window at the back of the house.

When he stumbles through the doorway to the stifling family room, there’s no blood, no rush of gore across the soft carpets: Nat’s on her feet, screaming into Clint’s shoulder, stamping her foot against the muted floorboards. Behind her, Pepper’s making hushing noises, the way Steve’s heard her talk to the goats when she’s sad. Thor and Bruce stand back from the rest, watching in shocked silence, and Father Stane and Tony are nowhere to be seen, though they _must_ have heard the screams by now; they must know what’s happening down here.

“Get it _out_ ,” Nat yells at Clint, and he pats her back desperately and Pepper tells her to walk around a little more; it’ll hurt but it’ll help, the baby’s not quite ready yet.

Not quite ready yet is an understatement. _Not quite ready yet_ is hours of Nat screaming and hours of her too tired to scream; it’s Steve carrying two towels drenched in sweat and puke to the old steel bathtub and rinsing them out as well as he can and stopping for a second to press his hands over his ears where nobody can see him. It’s Father Stane and Tony coming down the stairs at sunset and Father Stane laying his hand on Nat’s sweaty head while Tony looks around suspiciously and then laughs out loud like he’s decided this has to be a dream. It’s Bruce lighting lamps around the room while Nat lies on the floor panting and crying, her head cradled in Clint’s lap and Pepper’s hands gentle on her awful, stubborn belly. All their shadows leap at the walls as each lamp goes up, wavering frantically against the dull lead paint.

Steve’s sitting in the corner, watching and waiting for something useful to do with his stupid shaky hands. He got his breath back hours ago, little by little, but his chest still aches with every slow inhalation, and he has to close his eyes now and then so he can focus and breathe as gently as possible. When he opens them again, he glances across at the opposite corner: Tony’s rocking there, knees hugged up to his chest and cigarette wavering dangerously over his bare arms. He stayed downstairs when Father Stane went to bed, batting at Father Stane’s coaxing hand like a bratty kid and complaining that he wasn’t sleepy. Father Stane laughed, and when he was gone Tony sat down in the corner and hasn’t moved since except to light a fresh cigarette. Steve tried to sit next to him once, but Tony shook his head and snapped something about dying, and Steve hasn’t tried to bother him since.

Nat screams, louder than she has in a while, and Steve jumps so hard his skull thumps against the wall behind him. She’s sitting up suddenly, hands clawing aimlessly at empty air till Pepper catches them and tells her to breathe, _breathe_. Nat bawls that she _can’t_ , it hurts and they have to get it out of her now, she’s gonna die if it doesn’t come out now. Clint gives her a desperate smile and says it’s almost over, and Nat gets a hand clenched in his collar and screams that she doesn’t care if they cut it in pieces, just get it out right now before it kills her.

“It’s coming, Nat,” Pepper announces, looking up from between her legs, “it’s coming.”

The sound that comes out of Nat isn’t really a scream anymore, it’s just pain; Steve thinks he’ll see blood sputter out of her throat, but it’s just that long, cutting noise, bigger than her body, bigger than the lurch of muscles as Pepper tries to hold her steady and the towel underneath her turns dark, on and on as she turns red and white and digs slow holes in Clint’s neck, while Bruce bends over her and Thor kneels with towels and Tony sits staring straight ahead with his hands over his ears. It goes on forever and then it breaks up into harsh, ragged yells as Bruce tugs something slippery and purple out from between her bloody thighs that kicks and turns in his hands, so wild he almost drops it.

“Boy,” he rasps, “Nat, it’s a boy, he’s okay, it’s a boy.”

Steve hurries to help him, and feels his fingers slip on the hot slime on the baby’s legs; it’s writhing hard but not making a noise until Bruce tips it down a little and sticks his finger in its mouth. The baby coughs, strangles, coughs again, and gasps in a breath that turns into an angry scream as Bruce lifts it up and starts wiping away the mess coating its skin.

Nat’s stopped screaming; Steve worries she’s stopped breathing, because her eyes are closed and he can’t see her moving. He’s fumbling with the baby’s feet, helping Bruce hold it steady, when Nat yells again, too hoarse to be loud this time, and blood starts spilling out where it stopped before; as Steve watches, something dark and shapeless forces its way out of Nat. Her body’s turning inside out, gurgling and grunting and spitting blood, and Steve drops his end of the baby to stumble to his feet and run through the kitchen to vomit off the front porch, Rudy Martin’s ruined thighs and Nat’s dead white face spinning behind his eyes. Light flashes in his head, and he’s so dizzy he has to cling to the post to keep from falling into the grass as he retches again and again.

When he’s done, he stays where he is for a minute, hanging off the post and letting the gentle night air linger on his face, trying to focus on the gentle noises rising and falling in the darkness. He’s shaking hard; he rocks back on his heels, resting against the side of the house, and finally staggers onto his knees and then his feet, dragging one unsteady foot in front of the other to get inside the house. He follows the darkened kitchen wall to the hallway, and approaches the warm, shifting light of the family room.

It’s gone quiet since Steve left. Nat is cradled in Clint’s lap, padded with towels and blankets and shaking silently while he sings to her in a terrible, tuneless voice. Pepper sits beside them, her hand on Nat’s head, while Thor and Bruce scrub at the floor, filling a bucket with towels and blood and shit. Tony’s disappeared; so has the baby. Nobody notices Steve in the doorway for a few minutes, but he slips in and goes to sit at Clint’s other side, leaning in to touch Nat’s knee as carefully as he can.

“Steve?” she asks, working to blink her eyes open. Her hand wavers in his direction, and he takes it in both of his, squeezing gently.

“It’s me,” he says, “hi. Sorry.”

“What for?” she whispers.

“Never mind,” Steve says, then asks, “Where’s the baby?”

Clint shakes his head violently and gives Steve a death glare. “Shhh,” he tells Nat, “it’s okay, it’s all over now. Just rest.” She nods, eyes closed again already, and presses her face back against Clint. Steve stares around helplessly, and Pepper points silently towards the stairs. _He took him_ , she mouths.

Steve turns to stare up at the gaping mouth of the stairs, and hears Nat start to sob weakly into Clint’s shirt.

They lean like that, a lopsided pyramid holding Nat up, for what feels like hours while Clint keeps singing and wrapping Nat’s blanket better around her shoulders. Steve’s chest aches so much it’s numb, and he has to close his eyes to keep the light from burning his brain; every single nerve in his body must be on red alert, because his skin’s tingling and he can’t stop shivering in the crushing heat of the family room.

None of them sleep that night. Nat comes closest, spending the night never quite asleep or quite awake, too exhausted to raise her head and in too much pain to ever settle. Clint stays at her side the whole time, holding her hand and whispering things no one else can hear. Thor sits with his back to the wall and his eyes trained forwards; Pepper sits by the window a little ways off, staring up at the ceiling. Bruce tries to sleep at first, until Father Stane carries Tony downstairs, pale and sleepy from too many pills, and orders Bruce to put his fingers down Tony’s throat. When they emerge from the bathroom later, Tony curls up in the fetal position with his head on Pepper’s lap, and Bruce, who’s nearly as pale as Tony, lies down on the far side of the room and hides his head in his hands.

It feels like a dream, so Steve stays close to Nat, holding her hand for part of the night till his own is sticky and cramped, whispering to her everything his mother used to say when he was tiny and too sick to move, back before the fear of God tied her up so tight she couldn’t move. He hasn’t prayed in months; it’s Father Stane he trusts, not the god who beat his mother and chased him to hell and always seemed to be just waiting for a chance to rip his lungs from his body. But Father Stane’s not here and Steve is terrified, and he finds his fingers following instinct in the sign of the cross over his splintered chest as he squeezes Nat’s hand in his own.

Despite Steve’s worst fears, everyone lives till dawn. When the first warm light breaks over the ridge and through the foggy windows, Thor stands and goes out to the yard to bring back the morning’s eggs. Nobody feels like eating, but Thor makes breakfast anyway, and they all have a bite and throw the rest away, praying Father Stane won’t discover the waste.

After breakfast, Steve slips out onto the back porch to breathe deep for the first time in what feels like days, tentatively filling his lungs with light, fresh morning air that smells faintly of green leaves and goat shit. He’s sitting there, hugging his arms to his chest, when the door swings softly behind him and Tony’s at his side, swaying on his bare feet and staring out at the rising mist.

He doesn’t say anything, even when Steve turns and waits. There’s no focus in his eyes, and his hands are shaking so hard as he lights his cigarette that Steve holds out his own in case he drops something. Tony doesn’t seem to notice. He flicks the match into the grass, stumbles on the spot, and grabs Steve’s sleeve, still staring off into the middle distance.

They stand there like that, Tony holding himself up by the corner of Steve’s shirt, for a few long minutes, neither of them saying a word. Steve can feel Tony shaking, but he’s stubborn, even if Steve’s not sure he knows who he is. When he stumbles a second time, yanking on Steve’s sleeve so it slips down off his shoulder, Tony straightens up and shakes his head a few times, like he’s trying to focus.

He holds out a book of matches to Steve. “Here.”

Steve takes them. “I don’t smoke.”

Tony nods. “I know, idiot.” So he does know who Steve is. “Not for that.”

“What for, then,” Steve asks, and Tony doesn’t move for a minute, his hand clenched so tense on Steve’s arm that he’s worried he’ll break his fist.

“Fix it,” is all he says.

He turns and goes back inside, leaving Steve with the matches and the disappearing mist. It’s the last time Steve sees him on the farm, before the stars fall and everything ends.

\- - - - -

When Tony was little—way back, so little his pajamas still had feet on them and he couldn’t read on his own yet—the nanny used to read him a story about a boy who chased tigers till they turned into butter. He still remembers the picture, a string of tigers biting their tails around a palm tree, running faster and faster until the paint blurred and they melted, tails and whiskers and stripes running down to a hot ring of shining, slippery butter.

He thinks about that picture a lot in the week he lies in the upstairs bedroom with the baby screaming and Father Stane pacing the floor. His head feels slippery and hot, and any time he sits up the room spins so fast and wild that he has to plant his hands on the sides of the bed to keep from melting back to the pillow. Nothing looks the way it is; Father Stane’s too tall and the baby’s too red and the dead fan in the middle of the ceiling in always whirling, blurring into a hot ring of light overhead that shimmers and burns at the edges of his vision when he closes his eyes.

He’s dying, which he knows distantly: Father Stane gives him the pills every morning, because he’s proved himself, but they’ve stopped working, and he feels sick anyway. His head’s melting lead, his bones ache, and sitting up makes his stomach leap and burn like a trapped, sick bird inside his belly. He doesn’t sit up much. Mostly, he lies flat on his back in bed and feels his heart race in his chest, listens to the baby scream and wonders why Father Stane wants it to die too, and thinks about his nanny turning the pages in that old tiger book while he picked at the fluff on the knees of his pajamas.

He wonders what Steve did with those matches, and what exactly it was he _thought_ the crazy kid was gonna do with them. He wonders if his dad’s still looking for him or if he cancelled the reward along with all the credit cards. He wonders what happened to Rhodey. He hopes it was something good.

At some point—Tony can’t be sure how long it is after he locked them up here, because he can’t be sure of the difference between night and day and dreaming—Father Stane leaves, and it’s just Tony and the baby for what seems like hours. Somewhere downstairs there’s yelling, but Tony ignores that. He flips over onto his stomach and drags himself down to the end of the bed, following the sound of the baby crying. His head knocks up against the iron railing, which fucking hurts, but when the stars clear a little he picks up his head and he can see the kid lying in a laundry basket on the floor.

Tony hasn’t seen many babies, and right now he’s not in a position to judge, but this baby doesn’t look good. Its face is too red, almost kinda purple, and the way it’s crying sounds like Steve when he runs, which can’t be right. Tony couldn’t fix that even if he could get out of bed without dissolving into runny, stinking tiger juice.

He works a hand out of the covers and threads it through the rails at the end of the bed, fingers scraping the edge of the basket just enough to tug it a few inches closer. He rests his fingertips on top of the blanket and tries not to be too freaked out by the light, moving warmth under there: it’s a real person, tiny and breathing and on his way out. Somebody screams downstairs (Clint?), and the baby’s face screws up harder.

“Stop it,” he says. The baby doesn’t listen to him, not that Tony really expected it, but his head hurts. “Stop crying,” he says again, tapping the blanket weakly.

The baby keeps crying, and Tony rests his head on the covers and listens to doors slamming on the ground floor. “You had a great mom,” he tells the baby, who doesn’t even understand English. “I liked her.” Thor yells at someone that he’s going to kill them, and Tony hears Steve crying, begging him to stop it, his stupid baby voice cracking on every word; god, Tony hated him. He hopes he dies fast, the little Catholic nut. Doors slam again, and Tony sighs and looks down at the baby.

“You know, kid, growing up is overrated.”

It’s evening; there’s sun falling over the bedclothes, melting into the seams, drawing heat out all along Tony’s body. He feels it starting as he lies there with his hand falling asleep on the baby’s basket. It doesn’t start at his toes and work its way up, the way he thought it would. Instead, it’s a slow creep from the outside in, so slow it’s almost comfortable, as his arms, his legs, his back, his head and neck dissolve into stinging, golden sweat and he sinks like a stain into the stinking old mattress.

\- - - - - 

Steve woke up three days ago to darkness.

He’s estimating the passage of time by the rise and fall of light, but to be honest he can’t be sure anymore what he’s imagined and what he’s remembered and what out of all that is actually real. Once, he thought he heard somebody’s voice outside the shed, but he slammed his body against the door a thousand times and nobody ever came, so he thinks he dreamed it. His eyes adjusted to the darkness eventually, but he kept seeing things that even he knows aren’t there, things with wings and dark eyes that hover in the corners of the roof Thor built and evaporate the minute he looks at them straight on.

There’s been no food for days, and only the water he found in a bucket by the door, dusty and sour. His head aches so badly the pain’s a dull, glowing halo around his skull, lighting up the darkness and sending sparks off beyond the edges of his vision.

He scrapes his palm against the gritty earth, trying to remember his name. Father Stane won’t abandon him here. He couldn’t.

 _He did_ , something deep inside him answers.

“He couldn’t,” Steve says aloud to the darkness, scanning the roof for eyes.

It’s hard to keep his own eyes open. The left one’s swollen shut, tight with pain, but the other one’s started to droop, rolling back in the socket when he stops focusing and lets it go. He grinds his hand into the floor again, _he couldn’t._

There’s something in his pocket. He noticed it about an hour ago, but he doesn’t know what it is, and sitting up to wrestle it out seems daunting. He’s turning it over in the back of his mind, something to occupy him if he gets too nervous, if his mother’s face looms too close to his out of the darkness.

She came last night, for a little while. Steve remembers her hair, blonde like his, bunched up at the back of her neck and falling out a little, like she’d walked a long way to get there. She sat down on the ground next to him and was about to say something when one of the things with wings moved in the top of the shed, and when Steve looked back she was gone. He couldn’t tell what she was about to say, but he wishes he’d had the chance to say sorry.

The thing in his pocket is flat, almost too tiny and light for him to feel, but if he shifts his weight a little it brushes against his thigh and he can feel the edge digging gently into his skin.

He keeps listening for a sound outside, to know what’s happening to the others, but it’s dead silent except for the noise of the wind and the goats and the chickens, crying because nobody’s fed them. Steve cries a little himself, he’s so sorry. He knows he’s here because he doubted again, and he prays that means the rest are all right, but there’s a cold lump of fear that swells in his belly like Nat’s baby when he thinks of her, or of Clint or Thor or Bruce, or Pepper, or Tony.

 _Tony_.

He struggles up and puts his hand inside his pocket.

_He couldn’t._

_He did._

A wing and an eye swoop down at him out of the roof, and he ducks quickly, squeezing his eyes shut. When he opens them again, he’s alone, head ringing and chest full of expectation and fear.

He lights the match.

\- - - - -

Fury’s car makes it to the farm right after the last ambulance leaves. There’s not much to see at first: it’s just a farm, bunch of chickens running loose in the yard and a sad-looking garden out back. There’s the shed, of course: the roof caved in before the fire department got there, and it’s just a shell staring up at the sky, sending up soft lines of smoke even now. Fury goes over and kicks at the dust for a minute, but it’s unenlightening. They know how the fire started, so there’s no mystery to solve here.

He turns around and follows the broken track through the dirt, where they say the kid crawled away once he broke through the burning wall. Sure enough, there’s a spot of blood on the grass here, another a little farther on, so the story checks out. And here, where there’s more blood and a deep scuff mark in the dirt, must be where the paramedics caught him. The tracks stop after that, so Fury’s satisfied.

He turns back to the house and goes in through the back porch. Flipping the switch does nothing; electricity must not have been hooked up, which seems to fit. Back to the land, everything natural, keep the meter reader away when you’re raping the kids you abducted. Fury glances around at the pillows and incense and shit, then moves into the rest of the house.

The sergeant gave him a rough outline of where everyone was found—mostly in closets and bedrooms, one in the basement, and there’s nothing particularly impressive about any of those, except that one has a little more blood on the bed. Must have been the girl’s room. Nasty fucking story, Fury thinks, and moves on to the next room.

At the end of the hall on the second floor is a bigger room than all the others; the master bedroom, if the sergeant’s map was right, and Fury figures it must be. He can smell it from the top of the stairs, and when he makes it into the room his eyes almost water; it stinks worse than anything he’s ever encountered. Right in the middle of the room is a huge, filthy bed, one of those old-fashioned iron frames and a set of linen sheets with an amazing amount of old shit plastered in the folds. At the foot of the bed, between the chest of the drawers with the safe on top and the window open to the back yard, is a pool of crusted blood the size of a giant, smeared into gobs and tracing the narrow cracks of the ancient floorboards. The gun’s been taken into evidence already, but Fury doesn’t need to see it to know the story.

He leaves the room where Obadiah Stane died and closes the door behind him.

 

 


	5. Sally, Take My Hand

5.

Maria Hill is there when Howard Stark shows up at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center with a long black Mercedes and a sea of cameras in pursuit. She’s on duty in the lobby when he strides through, coat over his arm in 90-degree weather, hair slicked back like it’s 1943 again. The elevator takes him up to the ICU on the third floor, and then back down ten minutes later to meet the cameras and tell them in his radio voice that he’s very, very grateful to have his son back and appreciates everything that the medical staff here are doing to watch over his recovery. It’s a short speech, and when he finishes it’s a smile and a wave and back into the Mercedes again, driving off towards Malibu.

His son, from what Maria’s hearing, hasn’t woken up yet: when they found him in Stane’s bedroom he was deep in withdrawal from something (the lab’s still working on his blood and the pills from the safe) and dangerously dehydrated. They’ve replaced most of his fluids, but not enough to bring him out of the coma—or so she hears.

As for the others, it’s a mixed bag. There’s the big guy who only gives a Norse god’s name when they ask him. He was barely bruised and walked up and out of the hospital this morning; not a trace. They’ll send out a bulletin and have patrols on alert, but Maria doubts they’ll see him again. He was a guy who didn’t want to be found. She suspected the same might happen with Professor Banner, the guy with the broken glasses and the broken nose, but once he heard Miss Potts was talking he agreed to stay and write out a statement, on the condition he stayed anonymous. He’s on his feet, though, so he’ll probably be released by tomorrow and when that happens he’s not likely to stay in touch.

Natasha Rushman is in worse condition; there were some complications from the birth that went untreated, and for a while there was some concern with her turning septic, but she’s stable now. She’s refusing to see her parents, though, and won’t really talk to anybody except Clint Barton. He’s fine, aside from several broken bones and considerable dehydration—he’s supposed to be resting, but he keeps sneaking out of bed to go and sit with Natasha, which Maria finds sweet, if a little bit worrying.

Her baby is in the PICU, but it’s mainly the dehydration the doctors are worried about, and fluids are taking care of that slowly but surely. Somebody must have been feeding him during the week he was kept in the bedroom, because he’s pulling through surprisingly well, all things considered. Social services should be showing up later in the week to start working out what to do with him once he’s ready to leave the hospital.

Then there’s Steve. He was on the first ambulance out, and for a while no one was sure if he’d live or not, but there seems to be something tenacious about this kid, because even with severe dehydration, oxygen deprivation and third-degree burns on his hands and face, he’s kept breathing with only occasional alarming lapses. He’s still in the ICU, three doors down from Tony, but the doctors have started sounding hopeful when they say his name.

Maria’s shaken; she thinks everybody is, really. Three years on that farm, and nobody noticed most of these kids were even gone. It’s scary to imagine that things like this can happen, that people like Stane can appear out of nowhere and build a miniature hell right outside the third biggest city in the country, but that’s the world they’re living in now: there’s a psycho on every hill, and you’ve got to keep your kids closer than you think.

Fuck it, Maria thinks. If she’d ever wanted kids, she’d be too scared today.

\- - - - -

Pepper thinks she’s never going to stop hurting; from the soles of her feet to the scrape on the top of her head, she’ll be tired and aching till the day she dies. Still, when Detective Fury shuts off the recorder and lets her go, she doesn’t head back to her own room down the hall. She takes the elevator instead, reading the chart on the wall and punching in the number 3: _Intensive Care Unit_. She closes her eyes as the doors shut and the whole of the machine shudders upwards; after nearly two years on the farm, it feels so wrong to move this way, but she breathes with it and before she knows it the doors are pinging open on the third floor.

She walks down the hall, her steps weirdly hushed in the funny, lumpy socks the nurse gave her this morning, and ask the nurse at the desk where to find Tony.

When she’s repeated her question in a louder voice and explained who she is, the head nurse gives permission for her to see him.

“He won’t talk to anybody,” she explains as she leads Pepper down the hall, past rooms where the people look so sick and old they’re practically swallowed by their beds. “Maybe you can help,” the nurse finishes as they reach the right door, and she waves Pepper inside.

He’s even smaller than the people she saw walking down the hall, and there are tubes and wires all over him, but he’s not swallowed up at all. He’s propped up on a mound of pillows, red socks sticking out of the blankets at the end of the bed, and his dark hair stands out against the white linen, soft and floppy and so familiar something twists in her throat; it’s _him_.

He woke up yesterday, and his eyes are open now. He’s not looking at her, though, not even when she recovers from that first paralyzed moment and walks across the room to the bed. She has to say his name to get his attention, and she does it quietly, partly because she knows he gets startled and partly because she can’t make her voice do anything very well right now.

He turns, brown eyes searching dully for whatever made that noise, and sees her. Her throat tight and aching, Pepper gives a little wordless wave, and Tony hitches a hoarse breath in and bursts into tears.

It’s been months since they were alone together, just the two of them, but Pepper knows what to do. She leans forward and wraps her arms around him, letting his face fall into the angle of her shoulder and rubbing her hands down his shaking back; she forgot how hard he cries. She lets his fingernails dig into her arms, and reaches up to scoop the sticky curls of hair away from his face, leaning down to kiss his temple, the top of his head, every place Father Stane touched. She tells him, over and over again, because she knows he doesn’t believe it, that they’re safe now.

The first thing he says to her is “I thought you died.”

“No, Tony,” she tells him, “I didn’t. None of us did.”

He looks at her like he doesn’t believe it, like maybe he’d rather be holding onto her wrists in some medically monitored afterlife, and maybe she’d rather that, too, some moments. Then he laughs, a little hysterical, wiping tears and snot off his face with the inside of his wrist where there’s no tube to get in the way.

“Of course not,” he says, when he’s got his breath again. “We’re gonna live forever.”

It’s something Father Stane started telling them, in those last days, and Pepper thinks now they all knew, then, that none of it was real. She sits down in the chair at the head of the bed, and takes his hand, squeezing hard to remind him he’s alive and so is she and she’s here, she’s not going anywhere.

“Not forever,” she tells him. “Just long enough.”

\- - - - -

Sam Wilson remembers this hospital—it’s where they took him after he got off the plane from Vietnam, where they chopped off his foot and gave him a shiny new one, and he lay in bed eating peaches and rice pudding for weeks. That was two years ago, and not much has changed. The vending machine in the lobby, where he tried to buy a Coke on his way out back in ’68, is still broken.

He takes the elevator to the third floor and signs in with the nurse at the desk, then heads down the hall, heart beating high in his chest. He’s not sure why he’s here, to be honest—all he did was give the cops a tip, and he barely knew these people, but he remembers this kid. He’s the one Sam saw in his dreams all those months, crawling across the burnt grass in the yard. Besides, now that he’s seen the kid’s visitor list, he’s glad he came. He’s the first name on that sheet.

When he reaches the doorway, he has to pause. The person in the bed doesn’t look like the kid from Sam’s dreams—in fact, he doesn’t look much like a person at all. The parts of him that aren’t covered in white gauze are blistered and red; his eyes are swollen shut. Half the blond hair Sam remembers burned off in the fire, and what’s left sticks up in bizarre tufts around the crown of his head. From the doorway, Sam can hear the creaking rise and fall of each breath.

He sits by Steve’s bed for the rest of visiting hours, listening to him breathe and talking in a hushed, cautious voice. He explains who he is, hoping Steve can hear and remember, and tells him he’s glad that he got out okay. When he stands to leave, he touches Steve’s hand, and promises to come back tomorrow.

He comes every day to sit with Steve, watching the bandages on his face and arms move slightly from day to day. When he runs out of things to say about the farm and the things that happened since they last met, he tells Steve about his family, about his five sisters and his tiny niece; he talks about the weather outside and reads the newspaper aloud to Steve; he tells him about the feeling of flying a plane, and tries to make it sound real enough that Steve, if he’s hearing this, could feel that lightness for himself, even in his wired-in bed.

It’s a windy day, with clouds gathering in the hills, when Sam signs in at the desk and comes down the hall to find Steve sitting up in bed, staring down at his bandaged palms. He looks up when Sam comes in, and Sam, who’s gotten comfortable in this room these last few weeks, suddenly feels out of place under this weird blue stare.

Steve isn’t saying a word, so Sam starts them off. “Hi. I’m Sam.”

Steve nods silently. He blinks, slowly, laboriously, like the skin around his eyes is still stiff. Sam crosses the room and sits down; he starts to explain why he’s here, but Steve shakes his head, stopping him.

“I know who you are,” he croaks, putting a bandaged hand up to his throat like it hurts to talk. “I saw you. When I was asleep.”

Sam’s smile goes all the way down to his heart.

\- - - - -

Tony’s sitting up in bed smoking; the oxygen mask dangles around his neck and his hair’s sticking up like he hasn’t washed it in weeks. Rhodey loves him.

Tony apologized when he first saw Rhodey, and for an uncomfortable minute they both thought the other was going to cry, but then Tony asked about the broken toilet in Rhodey’s apartment and Rhodey explained he moved two years ago, and Tony said that old place was a shithole but he was too nice to say anything, and Rhodey reminded him he said it at least once a day for six months, and Tony conceded and lit a cigarette.

Now he’s sitting up and talking about integrated circuits, gesticulating and getting ash on the bedcovers. Rhodey interrupts him.

“Wait. They said you didn’t get a lot of news up on that farm.”

Tony shrugs, face closing off so fast Rhodey worries. “It’s not like there was a newsboy hiking up the canyon every day to throw papers at us,” he says in a fast monotone, not looking quite at Rhodey’s face.

“Did you hear about Neil Armstrong?” Rhodey asks, and Tony gives him the blankest look he’s ever seen.

“Who?”

\- - - - -

Ever since the farm, Steve’s head aches. Before, it was only now and then, but these days he wakes up every morning with a dull ache in his temples that spreads and widens throughout the day, till around suppertime all he can do is lie down and try to keep breathing.

He knows he’s lucky. It’s what everybody says.

It’s hard to remember to take the pills they gave him, overwhelming to think he’s the only one who can make that choice, but Sam helps. He still visits, even at the new house, and every time he hears that Sam’s arrived Steve feels something like flowers opening in his chest, a nervous peaceful feeling. He doesn’t understand it, but he knows he’d die if Sam ever stopped coming.

He gets letters here from the others, sometimes. Nat and Clint are sharing a room above a pizza place, and one day a postcard shows up from Canada with nothing but _Thor_ written on the back. Tony and Bruce don’t write, but Steve’s heard rumors that Bruce is working for the government and that Tony’s going to be out of rehab soon. He prays for them all, and sometimes it feels like there’s somebody listening.

Dad never even called, and Steve’s glad; he’s through with fathers. Sometimes he dreams about hell, the fire eating his face and his heart, and he wakes up cold and aching. He never sleeps after those dreams, and sometimes he walks around his room till dawn so he never dreams at all. He’s been told he has to stop this, but it works, so Steve hasn’t stopped yet.

He dreams about the farm sometimes too—just the farm the way it was; no pain, no hellfire, just the goats and the sunshine and his family around him. Waking up from those dreams hurts more than anything else.

He thought about going back there at first, just to see the sky spread out over the old place, but now he knows he’ll never go back. Even if it hadn’t burned, he never could: just like Idaho, just like Vietnam and the corner of Echo Park where he slept for six months, and every other place Steve’s been.

He’s lucky, he thinks. He went to Hell, and he crawled out on his own; he survived, three times now. He lives carefully now, because he doesn’t think he could survive a fourth.

Somebody comes to the door while he’s lying in the shadow of his headache; they say Sam’s here, he’s waiting downstairs if Steve thinks he can come down. Steve doesn’t think he can, but then he hears a voice in the doorway, and the sunlight wakes up in his chest as Sam sits down beside him, gentle hands on his back as he breathes in and out, lungs working stubbornly against the urge to empty and lie silent.

He sleeps after a while, he doesn’t know how long, and wakes up when it’s dark outside and Sam’s sitting at the end of the bed, reading a magazine. Steve sits up, relieved when the pain doesn’t knock him back, and scrubs his hair, wiping sweat and tears from the side of his face that pressed into the pillows.

“Hi,” he mumbles, and Sam looks up, his face softening into a grin.

“How you feeling?” he asks, and Steve replies, “Like an elephant stomped on my head,” like always. It makes Sam laugh, and that feels good.

Sam glances out the window; it’s night now. “Dinner?” he asks. Steve isn’t hungry, but he follows Sam downstairs into the kitchen and watches him mix water and noodles and cheese on the stove. It’s familiar, and that on its own feels better than a meal.

It’s when Sam’s switching off the stove, turning to reach into the cupboard for a bowl to pour the macaroni into, that Steve thinks he sees it. Just for a second—just out of the corner of his eye—it never stays for you to look. _The silent flicker of a wing, winking at him in the light from the stove at Sam’s back._

Sam comes over and sets the bowl down on the table; he gives Steve a funny look.

“Everything okay?”

Maybe he’s never been alone. Maybe, Steve thinks, he never will be.

“Yeah,” he tells Sam, and picks up his spoon.


End file.
